INTRANET SECURITY DEEMED UNSAFE

CIVILIANS BUCKING CHANGE AT NSA 

National Security Agency insiders say the organization's new director, Lt.-Gen. Michael Hayden, who took up his job in March, has [...]

THE PITFALLS OF MASS-PRODUCED ENCRYPTION 

During the G8 summit meeting in Moscow this week as ministers laid plans for future cooperation in fighting cybercrime several law enforcement and intelligence officials on the sidelines were instead weighing the consequences of mass-produced encryption. [...]

IBM AND MICROSOFT, THEIR SECRET ALLIANCES 

In recent months the Pentagon and NSA have undertaken secret and direct negotiations with the bosses of IBM and Microsoft to get them to install systems enabling the intelligence community to gain access to encrypted data. [...]

FRESH APPROACH TO ENCRYPTION 

The hand of the U.S. Justice Department and Pentagon in shaping American policy on cryptography became ever-more evident when the [...]

TAPPING INTO THE WEB 

The Home Office department that deals with organized crime recently published a consultative paper called 'Interception of Communications in the [...]

ENCRYPTION EXPORTS TO BE LIBERALIZED? 

The President's Export Council Subcommittee on Encryption (PECSENC) met in [...]

NEW HOME FOR GCHQ 

Cheltenham borough council has approved final details for a new center for Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Designed by the [...]

WORLD-WIDE INTERNET SECURITY SCHEME 

Washington is intent on creating a massive domestic and international Internet monitoring system, according to Intelligence Newsletter sources close to [...]

GSM CELLULAR PHONES INCREASINGLY UNRELIABLE 

Over the past six months a roaring trade has sprung up on back-street markets for equipment to intercept cellular telephone calls that had once been reserved for government intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The risk that GSM networks are being [. [...]

NSA VOICES FEARS IN CRYPTOGRAPHY 

Speaking before a House judiciary sub-committee on March 4, NSA [...]

HOW THE NSA "WEAKENS" ALGORITHMS 

In the latest of his electronic Crypto Gram publications dated Feb. 15, cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, head of the Minneapolis-based [...]

THE DRIVE FOR AGILE INTELLIGENCE 

The recent publication of the book "Top Secret Intranet" (Prentice Hall, NJ., ISBN 0-13-080898-9) by a former top-level NSA official, [...]

RED BOX EXPERIMENT A FLOP 

The "electronic red box" which the British government introduced last year has been scrapped because ministers couldn't operate the prototype. [...]

NSA'S POST-COLD WAR PROFILE 

Significant new details on how the National Security Agency is organized in the post-Cold War era have emerged from new [...]

ANNUAL RSA CONFERENCE 

For the first time, the 1999 version of the renowned [...]

WIDER BUGGING POWERS FOR AUTHORITIES? 

In the wake of two meetings – one in Vienna between Oct. 20-22 and the second in Madrid on Oct. 27-28 – a group of European Union law enforcement experts tabled a draft project on "interception of telecommunications in relation [. [...]

LOOKING FOR LOST CODES 

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) appears highly intrigued by the [...]

ENCRYPTION WITH A "PRIVATE DOORBELL" 

Thirteen U.S. computer companies announced on July 13 that they had made a new "breakthrough" on the encryption export front. [...]

SCSSI TO BE BEEFED UP? 

The French government is thinking of considerably beefing up the Service Central pour la Securite des Systemes d'Information (SCSSI) to [...]

THE THREATS AND TRANSPARENCY GAME 

In a hearing before a Senate panel on June 24, CIA director George Tenet and NSA boss Lt.-Gen. Kenneth Minihan [...]

NEW PUSH FOR NETWORK SECURITY 

Not too long ago the intelligence and defense sectors were alone in worrying about the security of information systems, and the question was handled on a national level. But with the growth of the Internet the issue now involves every [. [...]

NSA PUSHES ISRAELI COMPUTER PRODUCT 

The National Security Agency, which prides itself on ensuring the use of American-made chips and printed circuit boards for its [...]

ON-LINE SECURITY TESTED 

A team of specialized computer hackers from MI5, GCHQ and the Ministry of Defence's Signals Corp that was set up [...]

MERGER MANIA IN ENCRYPTION TRADE 

Experts are wondering whether a current wave of mergers in the U.S. encryption business can be interpreted as a sign [...]

HOW NIST AND NSA POOL THEIR EFFORTS 

Speaking before the U.S. Senate subcommittee for technology and space on Feb. 10, Raymond Kammer, the new director of the [...]

NSA TAKES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 

Clinton Brooks, who had served up to now as special [...]

CROWELL LANDS AT CYLINK CORP 

In contact with several companies in the computer field since he retired in September (IN 322/323), the former deputy director [...]

AUTHORITIES FIND LOTUS "FLAW" 

The Swedish government has just discovered that the encryption software in the Lotus Notes (IBM) system includes a "flaw" that [...]

PLUGGING HOLES IN INFORMATION SECURITY 

Unveiled on Nov. 5 after several months of sometimes story debate, the report that the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure [...]

WILLIAM CROWELL 

Less than two months after he retired as deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA), William Crowell has been [...]

ARMY UNDER NETSCAPE COLORS 

The U.S. armed forces have adopted Netscape for its communications. [...]

STANDARDS A WEAPON IN INFOWAR 

Up to now, standards and norms on a national or world level traditionally emerged from a long bureaucratic process established by engineers isolated in their specific technical fields. For some time now, however, this backwater world has become a strategic [. [...]

GETTING AROUND EXPORT CURB 

Two companies, UK Web Ltd. and C2Net Software, Inc., have [...]

CRYPTOGRAPHY'S LEAP INTO COMMERCIAL ARENA 

By the end of this year cryptography will have definitely quit the intelligence and defense spheres in which it has been carefully enclosed up to now and thrown itself into the commercial era. The RSA Data Security Conference which was [. [...]

PROTECTING SENSITIVE DOCUMENTS 

An Atlanta-based company specializing in encryption software for the Internet, [...]

SECURING DATA ON THE INTERNET 

Hewlett-Packard claims to have developed an encryption framework for securing [...]

DEEP INTELLIGENCE LINKS EXPOSED 

A book just published in New Zealand reveals fresh information about the workings of the so-called UKUSA signals intelligence network, [...]

A "LOCKBOX" TO KEEP CODES 

The U S company Trusted Information Services (TIS) was one of the first to criticize the Clipper Chip when it [...]

KEYS OF THE SECURITY KINGDOM 

European legislation on encryption is widely varied. For instance, Dirk Heuze, head of BSI, the German information security agency, strongly recommends that companies encrypt their messages on the Internet. His French counterpart, gen. Jean-Louis Desvignes, head of the Service Central [. [...]

A CIA TRAITOR'S IMPACT 

The United States still hasn't told the British government exactly how much damage CIA traitor Aldrich Ames inflicted on British [...]

EASING THE GLOBAL RULES 

New international rules and technical standards for cryptography that both the U.S. government and the majority of Western nations could [...]

BT'S SECURITY HEADACHE 

British Telecom heads a consortium named Inca that is bidding for an estimated one billion pound contract to upgrade the [...]

FBI AND IRS LOBBY TOGETHER 

American intelligence services are known to be strongly opposed to [...]

NEW BOSS AT GCHQ 

David Omand, a 48-year-old leading official at Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD), is strongly tipped to become the new head [...]

SCRAMBLER FOR SENSITIVE MESSAGES 

Most users working in companies or government services who need to protect their messages don't do so because encryption software [...]

A COMPUTER SPY UNMASKED 

For years Jean-Bernard Condat has undoubtedly been France's best-known computer hacker. Appearing on television talk shows, launching provocative operations and [...]

BRITAIN'S ANSWER TO CLIPPER CHIP 

The British government has been secretly funding a project to develop a British "key escrow system" to enable GCHQ to [...]

DAWN OF THE INFOWAR ERA 

A small group of American hackers who claimed to be infuriated over French economic spying against the U.S. were preparing this summer to mount an electronic assault on the main nerve centers of the French economy. [...]

THE FEARLESS CODE BUSTERS 

Damien Doligez, a 27-year-old French research worker who took a job at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et [...]

THE SCRAMBLE FOR RUSSIAN COMPUTER NETWORKS 

The Russians and Americans have been racing in recent months to grab control of computer networks in Russia. In the early days of perestroika the U.S. acted through various foundations and universities to equip many Russian scientists with computers and [. [...]

WILL NAUTILUS SCUPPER CLIPPER CHIP? 

Three American programmers, Bill Dorsey, Pat Mullarky and Paul Rubin, last month began using Internet to distribute the Beta version [...]

INTELLIGENCE BATTLE IN CYBERSPACE 

The huge information arena created by Internet has become a new, world-wide battleground for leading intelligence services. The same struggles that took place up to now in the "real" world are unfolding at present in cyberspace. [...]

BAD NEWS FOR GCHQ 

A committee looking into the capability, tasks and management structure at GCHQ Cheltenham at prime minister John Major's bidding is [...]

SECRETS OF MENWITH HILL 

British defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind recently signed a so-called Public Interest Immunity certificate claiming that any "official disclosures" in court [...]

LAYOFFS AT GCHQ 

At least 500 jobs will be eliminated at the GCHQ SIGINT base because of government belt-tightening. GCHQ bosses hope the [...]

NSA GUARDING A CLOSED MARKET? 

Denials of export licences for American encryption technologies and denials of joint development with foreign firms may have inadvertently revealed [...]

MORE WOES FOR CLIPPER CHIP 

The very company to first propose putting the public encryption Clipper Chip, with a government-approved "backdoor" in its products, AT&T, [...]

DAILY ENCRYPTION "MARKET SURVEY" 

Earlier this month there were hearings at the Senate Subcommittee on Technology and Law, chaired by Senator Patrick Leahy, on [...]

CRYPTOGRAPHY BATTLE 

On Thursday 19 May the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the adoption of the Digital Signature Standard (DSS) as the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 186. As such DSS is to provide unforgeable digital signatures to all [. [...]

NSA MANUAL "AVAILABLE" 

A Northern California software designer opposed to the adoption of the Clipper Chip public encryption system (I.N. n. 237) has [...]

CLIPPER MOVING IN OR OUT? 

A couple of weeks before the Clinton administration is scheduled to complete a classified review of the officially proposed Clipper [...]

CIA OFFERS INSTEAD OF TAKES? 

In the recent first issue of the electronic journal The Internet Letter (e-mail netweekàaccess.digex.net), Paul Wallner, the CIA's coordinator of [...]

CLIPPER CHIP'S POOR START 

On 16 April the White House Office of the Press Secretary announced the introduction of the "Clipper Chip" as "a [...]

CELLPHONES: CODING INTERFERENCE 

Recent conflicts between major intelligence services and commercial producers of secure, digital cellular telephones ("cellphones") lead to the unavoidable conclusion that there exists a very powerful but informal or highly secret coordination of Western intelligence services concerning crytographic technology. [...]

Acting on behalf of Campbell Christie, general secretary of the [...]